April
16 ,
2004
The
Sporting Woman: The Female Athlete in American Culture
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Annie Leibovitz (American, b. 1949)
Julie
Foudy, Midfielder, Seminole County Sports Training Center,
Sanford, Florida. Gelatin silver print, 2001 (negative
1996). Madeleine Pinsof Plonsker (class of 1962) Fund. |
Coinciding
with the 2004 U.S. Women’s Open Championship,
which will be held at The Orchards this summer, the Mount Holyoke
College Art Museum has organized The Sporting Woman: The
Female Athlete in American Culture, a special exhibition
about the history of American women in sports. The installation,
on view from April
13 until August 1 in the Weissman Gallery, includes a broad array
of more than 100 paintings, prints, athletic wear, books, and
other visual materials related to women’s participation
in exercise and sport from the mid-nineteenth century to the
present. On April 22 at 4:30 pm, Pat Griffin, professor in
social justice education at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst,
a nationally recognized expert on heterosexism and homophobia
in athletics, and consultant to the Women’s Sports Foundation,
will present the exhibition’s opening lecture. Titled “Celebrating
Women in Sport: On the Road to Equality,” it is free and
open to the public. A reception will follow.
Mount Holyoke played a key role in developing sports programs
for American women. When the school opened in 1837, physical
exertion for women was discouraged since the majority believed
it posed serious health risks, but founder Mary Lyon was adamant
that exercise would be integral to the curriculum. The College
continues to play a prominent role in women’s athletics.
In 2000 Sports Illustrated for Women ranked Mount Holyoke
number one among liberal arts colleges for women athletes.
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Among the carefully
selected images that tell the story of The Sporting Woman is
Winslow Homer’s painting Croquet Players (1865)
(right), on loan from the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo,
New York. Homer shows the leisure set at play, dressed to the
height
of fashion. Croquet, one of the new games introduced after
the Civil War, was among the first acceptable athletic activities
in which women could participate. It didn’t take long,
however, for women to be criticized for taking advantage of
opportunities during the game for flirtation, which was viewed
with horror
by the custodians of morality. By 1900, genteel women participated
in a wider variety of sports, including tennis. A stunning
portrait by Otto Bacher (1891) from the Cleveland Museum depicts
his wife
in tennis attire: a long-skirted dress and hat. For those seeking
exercise as well as recreation, tennis was the one of the fairly
vigorous athletic games a woman could enjoy without being subjected
to insinuations of “rompishness.”
The history of exercise for women in the United States is interwoven
with women’s education. The Mount Holyoke College Archives
and Special Collections holds a treasure trove of photographs
of students participating in athletics, dating from the 1860s
to the present. One, taken in the late 1880s, for example,
shows the Mount Holyoke Nine outfitted in their baseball uniforms,
among the first for women in the United States. Visitors will
be amazed to see the abundance of wool that was worn by Mount
Holyoke students while participating in gymnastics classes
during
the first decades of the twentieth century.
Today, we have a new kind of female athlete—muscular and
powerful, as can be seen in Annie Leibovitz’s photograph
of soccer player Julie Foudy (1996) and her portrait of Venus
and Serena Williams, works that are both part of the Mount Holyoke
College Art Museum’s permanent collection. However, American
society on the whole still is not comfortable with the concept
of powerful, athletic women.
Griffin knows firsthand how women in sports are viewed. She played
basketball and field hockey at the University of Maryland and
was a member of the U.S. field hockey squad in 1971. A former
high school field hockey and basketball coach in Silver Spring,
Maryland, she also coached swimming at UMass. The winner of a
bronze medal in the triathlon at Gay Games IV in 1994, she went
on to win a gold medal in the hammer throw at Gay Games V in
1998.
For the past 24 years Griffin has led seminars on heterosexism/homophobia
in sport at numerous colleges and universities as well as at
coaches’ and athletic administrators’ meetings
throughout the United States and Canada. An NCAA-recognized
speaker, she
has served as a consultant on homophobia and heterosexism in
sport for the Women’s Sports Foundation’s project,
It Takes a Team! Making Sports Safe for Lesbian and Gay Athletes
and Coaches; Out for a Change: Addressing Homophobia in
Women’s
Sports, an educational video; the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education
Network; and the Massachusetts Department of Education, among
others. The author of Strong Women, Deep Closets: Lesbians
and Homophobia in Sports (Human Kinetics, 1998), Griffin is
also
coeditor of Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice:
A Sourcebook for Teachers and Trainers (Routledge, 1997). Her short stories
and first-person accounts appear in numerous publications.
For more information, visit www.mtholyoke.edu/go/artmuseum/ or call
413-538-2245.
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